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How many times can dating die?

Dating is dead now, at the hand of Facebook, texting, “hanging out,” and “hooking up,” per the New York Times:

Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. Many students today have never been on a traditional date, said Donna Freitas, who has taught religion and gender studies at Boston University and Hofstra and is the author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.”

Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,” Ms. Freitas said.

This generation is not very good at face-to-face relationships. The image that comes to mind is two students, sitting in the room they share, angrily texting each other, but not talking. They all want to have intimate relationships, they want to get married and have kids, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know how to talk with another person. Just under half of freshmen said they’d been on a date. Relationships often begin with two people meeting at a party and hooking up. Then the next day they check each other out on Facebook, and if they like what they see they might send a message saying they’re going to a party the next night — but not inviting the other person. And if they both show up, and hook up again, that might go on for a while, and then they’d consider posting on Facebook that they were in a relationship.

Oh, for the old days, before Facebook and the ubiquitous Internet, back in 1998, when everything was different, and when Arthur Levine — yep, the same guy — wrote:

One of the things traditional-age undergraduates have been most eager to escape from is intimate relationships. Traditional dating is largely dead on college campuses, replaced by group dating, in which men and women travel in unpartnered packs. Group dating is a practice that provides protection from deeper involvement and intimacy. One student at Southern Methodist University summed up the dating scene this way: “I don’t think there is much serious dating until people are seniors. I mean, people go out a lot but do not want serious relationsips. There is a lot of sex. College is about casual sex.”

Students talked a lot about sex. On a given night the typical pattern is to go to a bar or party off campus, get drunk, and end up back in someone’s room. One student explained, “People will stand in the bar just waiting to be chosen at the end of the night.” Developing a sexual relationship that is not intended to be emotional is just another alternative to traditional dating. It is a pattern repeated all across the country and rationalized by students, who told us repeatedly that they have never seen a successful adult romantic relationship.”

Young people who read my blog, I have an important message for you. I went to college in the early 1990s. There was not much “traditional dating.” Lots of people complained about this, especially in newspaper editorials, and worried about our ability to forge meaningful relationships. You know what happened to us? We all figured out how to get married and have kids. Just so you know.